5 Best Tarantino Movies That Actually Give Us Some Hope, Ranked

Maybe it's us, or maybe it's Tarantino, mellowing out, but these films of his are actually much less grim and gritty than one could probably expect.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Let's kick it off with Tarantino's most recent offering, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. To really appreciate the film, you need to have at least heard of the tragic murder of eight-and-a-half-month pregnant Sharon Tate and all of her guests at her and Roman Polanski's home in Los Angeles by members of the infamous Manson family in 1969. By the way, rock musician Hugh Warner adopted the pseudonym Marylin Manson as an homage to Charles Manson and the Manson family. The film's events happen in the run-up to that gruesome episode. Taranino, however, introduces some wild cards into the story in the form of fictional action hero star Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who has a house right next to that of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski, and his hunk of a stuntman, Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt. Sharon Tate is played by beautiful Margot Robbie and the events initially unfold the same way they did in real life. For those of us who know what actually happened, tension becomes almost unbearable, but, in Tarantino's alternate universe, things take an unexpected turn. It's a beautiful movie, a kind of a love letter to the Hollywood of yore. It's best appreciated if you know the backstory the film is based on and takes such great liberties with to give us a happy ending where in reality there was tragedy and despair

Inglourious Basterds

Tarantino wrote and directed this movie about the French Resistance and American saboteurs during WWII. The story has tragedy and courage in spades. It follows a group of OSS operators parachuted into occupied France to kill as many Germans as they can and assassinate Hitler, if they can pull it off. They are the eponymous Inglourious Basterds, because, well, there is no glory to war, it's just murder. They team up with French resistance, British spies and some Jews in hiding and carry off what everyone in the allied nations was probably dreaming of doing back in 1943. We're talking more alternative history here, of course. All the cast deliver top-notch performances and the ending pulls no punches in going completely over the top to once again give us an ending that lets hope spring eternal.

Django Unchained

Django is a slave who is purchased and set free by bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz(played beautifully by Christoph Waltz). Django then becomes a bounty hunter and a partner to Dr. Schultz. The two go on a mission to free Django's girlfriend who's currently the property of a most unsavoury plantation owner named Monsieur Calvin J. Candie(one of Leonardo DiCaprio's best performances). Their plan seems to be working just fine until Dr. Schultz refuses to shake hands with Calvin J. Candie and just shoots him, instead. All hell breaks loose then. There's blood and bodies piling up but Django prevails in the end and rides off into the sunset with the love of his life.

Kill Bill

This two-volume epic is perhaps the best ever homage to B-movies of yore. The plot is as straightforward as they get: Uma Thurman plays the Bride, a member of an elite assassination squad who decides to settle down and have a child only to have her former employer/lover Bill and her former colleagues crash her wedding and turn her into a massacre. She survives, though, and goes on a revenge spree, killing her colleagues one by one in spectacular martial arts and shooting sequences until she gets to Bill to learn that while she was in a coma she gave birth to a daughter who is now living with Bill, her father. She executes the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique on Bill, causing his heart to explode after he walks several steps. The Bride then leaves with her daughter to have a new happy life.

Pulp Fiction

This film popularised the non-linear narrative, making it mainstream in the 1990s and itself becoming a classic in the process, a film that today is included on practically every list of the best movies of the era. The intertwining storylines feature robberies, philosophical discussions, perverts, drug overdoses and one sick twist dancing scene. In Pulp Fiction, characters you saw gunned down in a previous story come back to life to foil a robbery and walk off into the sunset in the next one, an approach to storytelling which creates a sense that time doesn't matter and entropy has no power over us.